THE TESLA FILES: A Whistleblower, a Leak, a Fight for Truth: The Inside Story of Musk's Empire, what it says on the tin

THE TESLA FILES: A Whistleblower, a Leak, a Fight for Truth: The Inside Story of Musk's Empire
SÖNKE IWERSEN & MICHAEL VERFÜRDEN
Steerforth Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A whistleblower.
A 100BG-leak of confidential internal documents.

This is the story of the fight to expose the truth of Tesla.

Elon Musk is one of the wealthiest people in the world. Tesla made him a 300-times billionaire. Starlink turned him into a force in global conflicts. X became his personal megaphone, stoking political turmoil at the touch of a button. With SpaceX, he aims to conquer the stars.

But a whistleblower, a 100GB-leak of confidential Tesla documents and two investigative journalists reveal the frightening truth behind the façade: an unusually high number of workplace accidents in Musk’s factories, dangerous errors in Tesla's autopilot software, a culture of fear and deception, and countless broken promises.

Investigative journalists Sönke Iwersen and Michael Verfürden take readers behind the shiny surface of Tesla. Through their chilling analysis of internal Tesla data and court documents set alongside the astonishing first-hand accounts of employees, customers and their bereaved families, The Tesla Files reveals a corporation in crisis. At its heart a billionaire who truly believes the world is his for the taking.

The definitive exposé of the world’s most powerful businessman and the rise and fall of his empire.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Systemic indifference to the privacy, the rights, really the importance of anyone not themselves is a hallmark of organizations connected to Muskolini. We saw that in the brazen theft of explicit and monetizable government data on taxpayers, for a start, by DOGE...never a Federal department, never authorized to do anything by the only legitimate authority, Congress, to act on behalf of the Federal government...that somehow has never been talked up by our media watchdogs in the US. Funny how Penguin Random House published this book in the UK but not the US, where a really small indie publisher brought it out; odd that a pair of German investigative journalists did this reporting, not anyone from a major US paper; and most interesting there's no translator credited anywhere in the book.

I'm sure the authors are sterling of character but I beg leave to presume they're not fluent enough in English to produce prose that does not raise my "say what now?" eyebrow. Deference to a famous, nay infamous lawsuit-filer with a serious need to control his public image? It can't be proven by me.

The facts as presented in this book are...let's stop at poor optics. It is definitely an exposé. I am inclined, on my own behalf, to agree with the bald statement the whistleblower is quoted as making in the book: "Elon Musk is evil." This being a matter of opinion it surprised me the authors left it in...until I read about Tesla's obscenely negligent handling of customer data, which you must agree to sign over to them when you buy one of their cars.

Twitter-destroyin', Starlink-abusin', money-hoardin' immigrant that he is, he's part of the culture we're living in, and it is my sincere hope that he, along with the Epstein-files-dwelling serial sexual abusers in his socioeconomic class, will be served justice before long.

A boy can dream.